Ruth Belcher Dyk, 99, Champion Of Women's Suffrage And Equality

Ruth Belcher Dyk, one of the last surviving participants in the women's suffrage movement, died in her apartment in Rochester, N.Y., on Nov. 18. She was 99.

In a life that included working with delinquent girls and producing anthropological studies of Navajo Indians with her husband, Walter, she never lost her fierce commitment to equality.

Only family protests prevented her from going door to door in her wheelchair to canvass for First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton's senatorial campaign in New York this fall. "If I have learned one thing, New York needs a woman's touch," she said at a Clinton rally.

Ms. Dyk's deepest inspiration was her mother, Annie Manson Belcher. She was one of the first women admitted to Tufts Medical School in the late 19th Century.

Ms. Dyk and her mother walked side by side down Beacon Avenue in Boston to demand the vote. Both were overjoyed when the 19th Amendment became part of the Constitution on Aug. 26, 1920.

She worked as a psychiatric social worker with delinquent girls in upstate New York and was a researcher at what was then called the Downstate Medical Center of the State University of New York. Ms. Dyk also was co-author of three books: "Anxiety in Pregnancy and Childbirth," "Psychological Differentiation," and "Left Handed."